A performance study on multi-server DVE systems

The advance in computer graphics and networking technologies leads to the development of distributed virtual environment (DVE), which allow remote users to share information and interact within a common virtual environment via a local area network or through the Internet. A DVE system needs to perform many tasks, such as processing of clients' requests, synchronization, object transmission and interaction handling. However, the workload induced by these tasks may become significant in a large scale DVE, where there may be a large number of concurrent users. In such situation, a single server based DVE system may not have enough processing power to maintain the system interactivity. To address this problem, a number of multi-server based DVE systems have been developed. In this paper, we explore how existing multi-server based DVE systems manage large scale DVEs and discuss various issues for implementing a multi-server based DVE system. We study the performance of such a system under various conditions via several simulated experiments. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.